This is the second editorial after I became the Editor-in-Chief of the journal of Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing (MSSP) in January 2011. Instead of having an editorial for each issue, my plan is to have one editorial for each year only, usually for the first issue of the year.

I would like to update some statistics of MSSP since my previous editorial in June 2012. I am pleased to report that the latest impact factor (2011) of MSSP has further increase to 0.953 from 0.822 in the previous year (2010). In 2011, we received a total of 99 regular papers. Except for 3 papers still under review, final decisions have been made on 96 papers with 26 papers accepted. This gives an acceptance rate of about 27 % (26/96) for regular papers. The number of submissions, including both regular papers and special issue papers, keeps increasing. At the time of writing this editorial on 8 November 2012, we have received 128 papers in 2012. As the number of papers published online has increased significantly since 2011, I would like to say that Springer will publish additional papers in 2013 to address the backlog situation.

The journal is also keeping its tradition of balancing regular papers with special issue papers. In 2012 (issue 23:4) we published a special issue on “Multidimensional Signal and Image Analysis on Health Care Applications”, guest edited by associate editor Julia Chung and editorial board member Robert Newcomb. In 2013 (issue 24:2) we will publish another special issue on “Challenges, Trends and Solutions for 3-D Imaging Techniques”, guest edited by editorial board member Eduardo da Silva and associate editor Carla Pagliari. Several new special issues are in progress and they are planned to be published in 2013–2014.

Since my previous editorial in the June 2012 issue, we welcome the new associate editors: Dongdong Fu, Andy Khong, Nam Ling, Arjuna Madanayake, Lorenzo Ntogramatzidis, Harish Pillai, Jinchang Ren, Li Song, Ligang Wu, Zhu Liang Yu, Masahiro Yukawa, and Hong Zhao. All of them are experts in the topical areas represented by this journal. While the associate editors and editorial board members appointed in the previous batch were mostly from Europe, the new associate editors this time are mainly from the USA, Asia and Australia. This is to ensure that the editorial board of MSSP is truly international. After serving as associate editors for many years, Yun Shi and Isao Yamada have now served in the capacity of editorial board members. We also want to take this occasion to thank outgoing associate editors Robert Leland, Yuan-Pei Lin and Ahmed Zayed for their long and valuable service to our journal.

Finally, I would like to introduce the new Editorial Office assistant Anitha Selvarajan who replaced Ramya Vasudevan recently.